Splinters in Your Eye

Praise

“With this collection of brilliant and insightful essays Martin Jay has returned to the topic that defined his early career: Critical Theory, i.e. the lives and works of theorists such as Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Kracauer, and Marcuse. Based on deep historical knowledge and endowed with great sensitivity for theoretical nuances, Jay traces the unfolding of what is commonly called the Frankfurt School. He succeeds in this endeavor by his refusal to treat their thought as the expression of a unified school. For this difficult task one could not have found a more suitable critic than Martin Jay. This book is a precious gift to America in these troubled times.”
—Peter Uwe Hohendahl

“In this sizzling collection of essays, Martin Jay demonstrates again that he is the unsurpassed reader of the group of thinkers known as the ‘Frankfurt School.’ In fact, he challenges the false unity and coherence of ideas and views often imposed upon them, including his own earlier writings on the subject. Practicing episodic and fragmentary historiography, he uncovers astonishingly novel angles of interpretation as well as demonstrating brilliant re-readings of known texts. An absolute pleasure to read.”
—Professor Seyla Benhabib

“Splinters in Your Eye provides ample evidence of the abiding relevance of Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Löwenthal, and Kracauer in our troubled times.”
—Ryan Tripp, New Books Network

“In elegant essays on subjects ranging from Benjamin’s stamp collecting to the [Frankfurt School’s] engagement with emerging psychoanalytic thought, Jay shows that its writings are not only historical curios, but indispensable for understanding our own age.”
—Stuart Jeffries, New Statesman